Why Trump’s staged McDonald’s theatrics don’t count as work

As Donald Trump handed people a bag of food at a McDonald’s drive-thru window, the former president remarked on how “beautiful” he found the family in the car. “It’s like the perfect-looking person,” the Republican said.

It was almost as if the people ordering the food had been carefully selected to appear in some kind of heavy-handed political play – because that’s exactly what happened.

Much of the public has probably seen some pictures of Trump briefly “working” at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania, but that’s not exactly what happened. NBC News reported:

According to some reports, the photo op was so fake that customers never actually ordered food: those who attended “just got whatever Trump gave them.”

In recent months, Trump has become unhealthyly fixated on the fact that Vice President Kamala Harris worked at McDonald’s while in college many years ago. The Republican apparently convinced himself that Harris was lying about this — it was never entirely clear how he came to that belief — and he has been annoyed about it almost daily since.

Nearly a month ago, the GOP candidate said he planned to go to McDonald’s “in two weeks” and “eat fries.” Trump concluded: “I would have worked longer and harder at McDonald’s than they did if I had done that for even half an hour.”

It took a little longer than two weeks, but he persevered and contributed to this staged campaign event. However, those who called this “work” were being overly generous: there is an important difference between work and theatrics, and this was definitely the latter.

Equally notable, this was a trolling exercise based on the idea that Trump had caught Harris in a lie, even though neither the former president nor any of his allies have provided a shred of evidence to support the vice president’s claim refuted. (A friend of Harris’s told the New York Times that she remembered working there.)

However, there was a fleeting moment of political relevance in this small production. The Washington Post reported:

That wasn’t a “yes.”